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Facebook Trapped In MySQL a 'Fate Worse Than Death'

Posted by timothy on from the cake-or-death-or-trapped-in-mysql dept.

wasimkadak writes with this excerpt from GigaOM: "According to database pioneer Michael Stonebraker, Facebook is operating a huge, complex MySQL implementation equivalent to 'a fate worse than death,' and the only way out is 'bite the bullet and rewrite everything.' Not that it's necessarily Facebook's fault, though. Stonebraker says the social network's predicament is all too common among web startups that start small and grow to epic proportions."

2 of 509 comments (clear)

  1. That's not Facebook's problem by Animats · · Score: 5, Informative

    Academic purist discovers that one of the most prolific and successful database users in the world is using a system he doesn't approve of. He decides, with no insider knowledge at all, and despite all evidence to the contrary, that they should throw everything away and start over from scratch using a system that he thinks would allow them to see the performance and scalability that they've already achieved.

    Right.

    Some of the key architects of Facebook have spoken at Stanford about how the system is put together, and I went to that presentation and had a chance to talk to them. They didn't consider MySQL to be a bottleneck. Their big problem was PHP performance. They were writing a PHP compiler to fix that.

    Internally, the user-facing side of Facebook is in PHP. But the front end machines don't talk directly to the databases. They use an RPC system to talk to other machines that do the "business logic" parts of the system. Building a Facebook reply page may involve a hundred machines. There's heavy caching all over the system, of course, so the databases aren't hit for most read requests.

    The RPC system isn't HTML, JSON, or SOAP. It's a binary system that doesn't require text parsing. Otherwise, RPC would be the bottleneck.

    This makes for a flexible, easy to enhance system. New services go in new machines, which talk to existing machines.

  2. Stonebraker trapped in Stonebraker by midom · · Score: 5, Informative

    (reposting as a logged in user) I wrote a bit longer response to this:
    stonebraker trapped in stonebraker 'fate worse than death'

    I think I know a bit more about database situation inside FB than Mr.Stonebraker. Go figure.